Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  By the time I got to New York, Carmen was out of intensive care but was still weak. She’d been diagnosed with a tubular pregnancy and had lost a lot of blood. She was so relieved to see me that I knew I had to stay with her. I found a hotel room walking distance from the hospital and settled in.

  Every day, I’d call home to Ohio. “How’s it going over there?” I’d ask.

  “How’s it going over there?” they’d say.

  The brothers were delaying the funeral for me and Carmen to attend, but it was becoming clear that Carmen wouldn’t be well enough to go. After a few more days it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to, either.

  “You guys should go on with the funeral without us,” I said. As much as it pained me to miss it, we all had to get back to our respective homes and jobs. Further delay wasn’t practical. Funerals are for the living, not the dead. We’d already lost my father, but Carmen was still in need.

  A few days after the funeral, Mike and Al flew to New York. I left Carmen in their care and returned home to California. Seeing Janet and the kids so healthy and vibrant after I’d been dealing with a death in the family and a medical emergency made me grateful for all we had. Still, I cannot deny that missing the funeral left a giant hole in my heart. I didn’t get to mourn my father or grieve with my siblings or to say a proper good-bye as the casket was lowered into the ground. I was left with an angst that, once I reentered the fray of work and the routine of family life in California, I had no chance to explore.

  My father never got to see Badlands, which went into wide release about the time he was admitted to the hospital and passed away. I would have liked for him to see my performance, which I’ve always felt was one of the best of my career. I know he would have been proud.

  The critical response to Badlands was overwhelmingly positive. Terry Malick was heralded as a genius, and rightly so; the film was lauded as a hauntingly beautiful, warped fairy tale. The New York Times called Sissy Spacek and me “splendid” in our roles. Still, opportunities did not immediately come pounding on the front door. At thirty-four I was starting to feel like my time to break out of the pack was passing. Other actors, the ones I admired most and thought were the most talented of my generation had all advanced careerwise; I felt I was equally talented and, while I confess to a large measure of envy at times, I was far more confused and left to wonder, Why can’t I get the big jobs?

  That’s a big reason why I drank. Alcohol allowed me to feel and do things I didn’t have the courage to feel and do when I was sober. Often when I got a few in me I would get in people’s faces, get self-righteous and accuse them of dishonesty, when in reality I was the one who couldn’t be honest with myself. Or I’d go off on an arrogant tangent that became increasingly heightened and absurd. When I drank, I was an angry, terrible bore.

  Thank God for Janet. The kids could always trust her to be honest and reliable.

  There was one great benefit to drinking that I wasn’t ready to give up. Back at the Living Theatre in New York, I’d discovered that I could use alcohol to help me draw on the range of emotions that actors need to feel. When I was drunk, I was more sensitive and less inhibited, more open to this abundant pool of sense memories. I would weep a lot when I drank and feel sorry for myself, and this became an easy ticket to the emotional well when I needed to get there on stage or on camera. Sometimes I went on stage after a few drinks, but I knew how much I could drink before I lost it, and I kept enough control to always stay on the safe side of that self-imposed limit. Or at least I thought I did.

  When I was in character, this felt acceptable, as if alcohol were a legitimate professional aid, but off stage and at home my drinking only fed my insecurities and self-pity. It fed right into my sense of “poor me” and I thought it gave me license to misbehave. It was so easy to make excuses for myself to myself, like Oh, hell, I’m drunk. They’ll understand. Sometimes they did. More often they didn’t.

  Fortunately, I took acting too seriously to ever let drinking get in the way of my work. In 1974 and 1975, I acted steadily in some very fine television movies. I played an army deserter with a death sentence in The Execution of Private Slovik, a Robin-Hood style bank robber in The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd, a hot-rodding vigilante in The California Kid, Attorney General Robert Kennedy in The Missiles of October, and an escaped mental patient who kidnaps Linda Blair in Sweet Hostage. Then in early 1976 I was cast in The Cassandra Crossing, an ensemble film produced by Carlo Ponti. It was scheduled to shoot for three months in Europe. Janet and I took the kids out of school in January and headed to the first location in Basel, Switzerland, for one very cold week and then to Rome for three months. We rented an apartment in the Pinciano district north of the city, a short drive from Cinecittà Studios in southeast Rome where all of the interiors were shot.

  Among the last of the 1970s disaster flicks, The Cassandra Crossing was in the spirit of The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and Earthquake. It told the story of a deadly virus introduced onto a train full of innocent people traveling across Europe and of the passengers’ mad rush to save themselves before a U.S. government agency could destroy the train. My character was the younger lover of a wealthy German diva played by Ava Gardner. He was also, as it was revealed late in the film, a heroin smuggler being pursued by O. J. Simpson, who played a U.S. narcotics agent disguised as a priest. My character got to trade blows with O.J.’s before flying off the side of a moving train to his death. And that wasn’t the half of it, for that film.

  The Cassandra Crossing may not have been one of the best movies ever made but it was the most fun I’d ever had on a set and one of the most talented casts I’ve worked with. In addition to Ava and O.J., there were also Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Lee Strasberg, and, in the role of heroine, Carlo Ponti’s wife—the legendary Sophia Loren. The kids would come onto the set and not recognize anyone except O.J., who was still playing football for the Buffalo Bills at the time. Ava Gardner took a special liking to them. She didn’t have children of her own but she loved spending time with ours, and they responded to her almost as a special aunt. She developed a close bond with Ramon that lasted until her death in 1990.

  Rome’s Cinecittà Studios lived up to its name. Cinema City was the crucible of Italian filmmaking and a draw for American filmmakers as well. Roman Holiday, La Dolce Vita, Ben-Hur, and Cleopatra had all been filmed there. With twenty-two stages on nearly a hundred acres, multiple movies would always be shooting at the same time. While we were doing The Cassandra Crossing, Federico Fellini was a few sound stages over shooting Casanova with Donald Sutherland in the lead role. Emilio would meet me for lunch at the commissary and Sutherland would be there outfitted in a long powdered wig and the ruffles and buckles of an eighteenth-century Venetian dandy. Max von Sydow would show up in military uniform shooting The Desert of the Tartars and we’d sit with Sophia Loren in full makeup and O. J. Simpson wearing the black-and-white Roman collar. Just eating lunch at Cinecittà was like being inside a Fellini film.

  The Cassandra Crossing was set to wrap on schedule in April, right after Easter. One weeknight before Good Friday, our apartment phone started ringing in the black dead of night. I rolled over and looked at the clock: 3:00 a.m.

  I stumbled out of bed and into the living room, which held the apartment’s only telephone. The line crackled with the static of an international connection.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Please hold for a call from the United States,” a voice said.

  Then—“Marty? Fred Roos calling.”

  I rubbed my eyes to wake myself up. Fred Roos was a producer who worked with Francis Ford Coppola.

  I’d met Coppola briefly in New York in 1968 when he was making The Rain People. I was one of a group of up-and-coming New York actors he was trying to get to know. I’d seen him again in February 1971, this time with Roos, when I did a screen test for The Godfather. I was in the middle of shooting a TV movie in L.A. that had been shut down by the Sylmar earth
quake. The shutdown gave me a few days to fly to New York for the screen test, but I couldn’t cut my hair or shave my mustache, which I would need when filming resumed, so I did the screen test playing Michael Corleone with long, scruffy hair and a mustache. I knew immediately that I was wrong for the part but I knew someone else who’d be an exact fit.

  “You know, my friend Al Pacino is perfect for this role,” I told Coppola. “If you don’t use him for Michael it’d be like benching DiMaggio in his prime.”

  “I know,” Coppola agreed. “I want Al but the studio doesn’t. That’s where I’m at.”

  I don’t know how they resolved that difference, but one Academy Award and two sequels later, Pacino proved to be the best choice by far.

  Coppola was now in Southeast Asia making Apocalypse Now, a film about the Vietnam War. I’d heard that Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, and James Caan had all turned down roles. It seemed that nobody wanted to go to the Philippines for four months. They must have known something I didn’t.

  Harvey Keitel ultimately was cast in the lead role of Captain Benjamin Willard, the army captain sent up the Nung River to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a Special Forces operative who’d gone rogue. Filming had started in the Philippines months ago, but now Roos was calling me in Italy, in the middle of the night. How had he even gotten my number at the apartment?

  “Listen, Francis would like to see you. What’s your schedule?” he asked.

  He didn’t say what Coppola wanted, but when the director of The Godfather asked for a meeting, it was in your best interest to take it.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve got Good Friday, Saturday, and Easter Sunday off,” I said.

  “All right,” Roos said, and that was it.

  When I got back to the bedroom, Janet was awake. “Who was it?” she asked.

  “Fred Roos.”

  “What did he want?”

  “They want me to come to the Philippines and do Apocalypse Now.” I don’t know where that knowledge came from. Roos hadn’t said anything of the kind, but nonetheless those words came tumbling out into the darkness of our bedroom.

  “He said that?” Janet asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I know that’s what it’s about.”

  Sure enough, Roos called back the next day. “We can arrange a ticket to Los Angeles,” he said. “Can you come?”

  “I will,” I said. I figured I could fly back to Los Angeles, stay in Malibu for Easter weekend, and then turn around and return to Rome for the last few days of filming the following week.

  I got on a plane two days later—me and the four giant duffel bags I was lugging home for the family. In Basel we’d bought ski clothing for all of the kids, and as I prepared to leave Rome Janet said, “As long as you’re going home, I’ll pack up the kids’ heavy stuff and you can bring it all back. That’ll save us from having to take everything with us when we leave next week.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed. So we bagged up four enormous duffels full of winter clothes. I checked them at the airport in Rome, retrieved them from the carousel at LAX, and dragged them over to the customs line. My instructions were to meet Fred Roos outside of customs and then he’d take me to the Philippine Airlines lounge, where Coppola would be waiting to meet me before his return flight boarded for Manila.

  The customs officer looked at my forms and motioned me to a side table. He opened the bags and pawed through the piles of children’s winter clothing.

  “Are you opening a haberdashery?” he said.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “Then what are you doing with all this clothing?”

  “These are my children’s clothes,” I said.

  “Where are your children?” he asked.

  “They’re still in Rome. I’m traveling alone.”

  With that, the officer escorted me into a small room where an interrogation began. I couldn’t believe it. Did they really think I was trying to sneak in used kids’ clothing from Europe to sell in the United States without declaring them to customs?

  The answer, it became evident, was yes.

  I answered all their questions, but it didn’t seem to matter what I said. An hour and a half passed. I couldn’t get out of customs, and if you can’t get out of customs you can’t get into the country. Meanwhile, Coppola was sitting in the Philippine Airlines lounge with his own clock ticking. His flight would be boarding in thirty minutes.

  “Look,” I said. “The clothes aren’t even new. They’ve already been worn.” I opened a bag and pulled out a sweater with a small hole in it, and a pair of pants streaked with stubborn dirt. “If you want to keep the clothes you can keep them all. I don’t care.”

  That finally convinced the officer, who released me from the room. I lurched out of customs dragging my four gigantic bags of children’s clothing and practically collided with Fred Roos in the receiving area.

  “Francis is up in the lounge,” he said, ushering me along. “The driver will stay with the bags. We have to run!”

  We took off toward the Philippine Airlines lounge. If we’d had the kind of airport security then that we have now, I never would have made it in time. I still had the collar-length hair of a heroin-smuggling lothario and by then I’d played any number of bank robbers, kidnappers, and degenerates on the run from the law. But this was real life—no cameras, no lights, no mics. Just me and Fred Roos racing across the international terminal of LAX hoping to make it to a meeting that could potentially change the course of my life and most certainly my career.

  Like action heroes, we burst through the doors of the Philippine Airlines lounge. And there was Francis, sitting calmly in an armchair across the room.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “I got stuck—”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, cutting me off. “Look, I just wanted to see you. You know I’m in the Philippines and I’m doing this film. We’re having some problems. When are you finished in Rome?”

  “Next week. Just a few more days of shooting, that’s all.” I’d heard his film was regrouping but beyond that, I didn’t have a clue what was going on.

  We made some small talk and then he said, “Okay. We’ll be in touch.” And he left.

  That was it. The whole meeting lasted fifteen minutes tops, and he was on his way back to Manila. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.

  I turned to Fred Roos. “I have a script for you,” he said, “and I want you to read it as soon as you can. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. Fred gave me the script and said, “I’ll be in touch.”

  Then he left and the driver took me and my four duffel bags back to our house in Malibu. My body was still on Italy time, exhausted but too revved up to fall asleep. I sat in the backyard and read the script. I still hadn’t been told what part I was being considered for, but I had a suspicion that it might be for Captain Willard.

  I put the pages down on the table and thought about all this. I was thirty-five and in reasonably good shape despite a two-pack-a-day smoking habit, but I was still more than a decade older than kids in their twenties who’d been in Vietnam. Though I’d played soldiers before—in Catch-22 and The Execution of Private Slovik—I’d never played a soldier in active combat. My younger brother John had been a Marine Corps medic, but I didn’t know the first thing about an M16 or a .45, both of which the script called for the character to use as effortlessly as a third arm. The role was an enormous opportunity I knew I couldn’t pass up, but I honestly didn’t know if I could pull it off convincingly.

  Roos called me at home the next day. “Did you read it?” he said.

  “I did.”

  “Would you like to do it?”

  “Of course.” There was still no confirmation of the role, but I knew. It was Willard. It had to be Willard.

  “We’ll call you in Rome,” Roos said.

  The next day, Easter Sunday, I boarded a return flight to Rome with the first-class
ticket Coppola’s production company had bought for me. On the plane I sat down next to the actor Martin Balsam. We knew each other from Catch-22 and we talked all the way to Italy.

  “There’s a chance I’ll be going to the Philippines in a few days to work on Coppola’s current movie,” I said.

  “Really?” he asked. The film’s production woes had been covered in the U.S. press for the past few months, but I hadn’t seen any of it in Italy. Marty probably knew more about the film than I did at that point.

  At the airport I met up with our Italian driver, Carlo, who brought me down to the seacoast. The family was staying in a little cottage there on the beach for Easter week.

  “How’d it go?” Janet asked when I arrived.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  Roos called again the next day, just after we returned to Rome. “Can you be in the Philippines this Friday to start shooting?” he asked. He confirmed that Keitel had been let go and they wanted me to replace him. This meant some scenes would have to be re-shot and the production was already running over schedule. I was asked to commit to sixteen weeks in the Philippines, which would bring us right to the end of summer.

  “I’m not too old for the part?” I asked.

  “The guy’s a captain. He’d be older than the rest of the soldiers. We don’t want someone who looks twenty-one.”

  Good point, I thought. Maybe I could be a convincing captain, but I still didn’t know if I could endure the physical rigors of sixteen weeks of shooting in the jungle.

  “I finish here on Wednesday,” I said.

  “We’ll have to speak with your agent to work out the deal.”

  That’s when things got complicated.

  Francis was asking for either five-year personal contracts or a commitment of seven movies with his company from his principal actors in Apocalypse Now, with the right to use us in future films for a predetermined salary. Later Francis told me this was because his films had turned a good number of unknown actors into major stars and when he wanted to work with them again he couldn’t get them signed without breaking the bank.